Godzilla, King Of The Monsters, Turns 60 With Style

Aging with aplomb, the toothy beast is back for more. But the real Godzilla will always be a man in a suit.

Godzilla looms large in my memory. As a child of the 1970s and 80s, along with Bruce Lee and Schoolhouse Rock, Godzilla dominated many of my Saturday afternoons, and was on heavy rotation in my friend's Beta player on those glorious days when our gang skipped school.

Of course I'm talking about Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, the Americanized version of the 1954 Japanese original, Godzilla. Raymond Burr's campy performance sealed our love for the film, but we were also suckers for the many sequels, featuring Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah. Why? Suitimation!

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I attended a screening of Godzilla: The Japanese Original – 60th Anniversary Restoration recently, and while it's raw and unrefined, it also includes probably the most awesome use of a man in a rubber suit – referred to in the biz as suitimation – ever.

As the legend goes, Eiji Tsuburaya, who served as the special effects director on the film, initially intended to utilize stop motion animation, similar to Willis O'Brien's work on 1933s King Kong, to bring Godzilla to life. But time and budget constraints made that impractical. Tsuburaya then hit on "suitimation," using a man in suit against a miniature set, as his solution.

Artists all over Japan were commissioned to send in designs, from which the first Godzilla suit was created using bamboo wrapped in chicken wire and covered with fabric. Liquefied latex was then applied to the almost seven-foot-tall, charcoal grey, 200-plus pound costume to complete Godzilla's alligator-like skin, said to represent the monster's physical scarring by an H-bomb blast. Too heavy and cumbersome at first, the suit underwent considerable modifications before it was ready for use on screen, when black belt stunt actor Haruo Nakajima, and a teen named Katsumi Tezuka, were hired to play Japan's most famous titan of terror.

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Thus kaiju eiga, or the Japanese monster movie, was born.

"Godzilla wasn't a movie like King Kong, it was a movie about destruction," Steve Ryfle, Godzilla expert and director Ishiro Honda's biographer, told me. "This wasn't a sympathetic character. It was about The Bomb and the U.S. occupation of Japan. So you couldn't have had stop-motion with fires and explosions and the level of destruction that you had in Godzilla. Having Haruo Nakajima in a suit may have been groundbreaking but it was also a necessity."

Godzilla cost almost $1 million to make, an enormous sum in 1954, and was the most expensive Japanese film ever made at the time. Still, in his cumbersome suit, Nakajima had to destroy those intricate miniature models of Tokyo on the first take.

"I think one of the charms of this film is that it's handmade," Ryfle said. "It wasn't an occupation to make a movie like this. Godzilla was made via trial and error, so they did occasionally have to take a day and rebuild miniature sets when they weren't destroyed in quite the right way, but many times they did have just one chance to get it right. It's unlike anything we know of today in film."

Campy and underbaked in almost every way to 2014 eyes, suitimation, the use of miniatures and mattes, and intricate sound effects – most notably Godzilla's still-terrifying roar – were groundbreaking in almost every respect. Godzilla spawned 26 sequels, most just about fit for Saturday afternoon binge watching, not to mention a 1998 Hollywood update and the upcoming Warner Brothers/Legendary Pictures version starring Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche that opens on May 16th.

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"Every pop culture creature is subject to reinterpretation," Ryfle said, reflecting on Godzilla's new life. "But it is ironic that the country that caused Godzilla to exist is now the one reinterpreting it. In fact, the people who created the original Godzilla are incredibly proud of what they achieved. And I'm sure Toho, the company behind Godzilla in Japan, will continue to make movies using a guy in a suit because they see that as the tradition and they take it very seriously."

"I saw Haruo Nakajima at a convention not long ago," Ryfle continued. "And before he took questions he said he had a statement. He said, 'The real Godzilla is a man in a suit.' And the crowd went crazy, cheering. I think that says it all."

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